BETH ORTON: THE OTHER SIDE OF DAYBREAK (2003)
1) Ooh Child; 2) Thinking
About Tomorrow (PG Dub); 3) Ali's Waltz; 4) Daybreaker (Four Tet remix); 5)
Bobby Gentry; 6) Carmella (Four Tet remix); 7) Beautiful World; 8) Concrete Sky
(acoustic); 9) Daybreaker (Roots Manuva remix); 10) Anywhere (Two Lone
Swordsmen remix vocal).
It is not often that an album of outtakes, remixes,
and rarities outshines the mothership to which it is appended as an
afterthought / bonus-for-the-fans, but, depending on how you feel about Daybreaker, this might just be the
proverbial case. There is no question, at the very least, that The Other Side is a much more diverse
and much less predictable compilation; so if you thought, like me, that the
monotonous moodiness of Daybreaker was
somewhat limp and lifeless rather than mesmerizing, welcome to the other side. It
is less ambitious and completely dis-conceptual, but at least it does not make
you want to go to sleep and never wake up.
The series of remixes offered here
significantly raises the bar on the -tronica
segment of «folktronica», which is good — ʽAnywhereʼ, for instance, is
transformed from a boring jazz-pop standard (bordering on adult contemporary)
into something livelier, darker, and notably more psychedelic than it used to
be, and the same goes for ʽThinking About Tomorrowʼ, which is now all awash in
astral noises and more reminiscent of Massive Atack than confessional
singer-songwriting. The most radical transformation, however, happened to
ʽCarmellaʼ, which used to be a three-minute country-pop single and now is an
11-minute long extravaganza, a huge sonic soup in which Four Tet, the remixer,
crams every sort of digital and analog noise imaginable (the three-minute coda should
be subtitled «The Amazing Life of Giant Robot Insects», and who cares that it
is completely unrelated to the original song?).
The electronic remixes are interspersed with a
couple of really good originals — ʽBobby Gentryʼ, on which Beth lowers her
voice so much that she almost sings like a modern day Nico in places, combines
acoustic folk backing with pseudo-mid-Eastern string arrangements, giving the
song some majesty, mystique, and a pinch of roughness that was nowhere near in
sight on Daybreaker; and the tender acoustic
rendition of the old soul hit ʽOoh Childʼ by The Five Stairsteps brings on that
criminal thought that maybe the lady
should do more covers and less originals, at least when she cannot bring the
originals to boil. Finally, there is a very good acoustic rendition of
ʽConcrete Skyʼ that sounds not only more intimate, but every bit as catchy as
the fully arranged original — that Johnny Marr guy writes some rock-solid
material, doesn't he?
All in all, there is not all that much to say
here, as usual, but that shouldn't stop you from searching out this album if you
care at all about the artist, or, for that matter, the various artists from the
electronica scene that helped her produce it. If it was intended as an
intentional «antithesis» to the weightier, more «serious» and «personal» Daybreaker, it should count as an integral
part of Orton's discography, because «serious» and «personal» is not really
what she does best; it is the inexhaustible bag of tricks that she gradually
exploits with her various partners that matters, breaking barriers between
tradition and futurism like some sort of female Beck. Ah, if only she also had
Beck's sense of humor as well — but I guess that would be asking for too much. Anyway,
an unexpected thumbs
up here, as much as I expected to hate this album.
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